Tekken Boss Katsuhiro Harada Is Leaving Bandai Namco After 30 Years Of Iron Fist Tournaments

Tekken development chief Katsuhiro Harada has announced that he’ll be departing from the fighting game series and its publisher Bandai Namco at the end of 2025. Harada–who has worked on every Tekken game since the series first debuted in 1994–said in a social media post that the death of close friends in his life had led to him to consider how much time he had left as a creator, and after consulting PlayStation icon Ken Kutaragi, he decided to leave the publisher after spending 30 years working on the Tekken franchise.”With the Tekken series reaching its 30th anniversary–an important milestone for a project I’ve devoted much of my life to–I felt this was the most fitting moment to bring one chapter to a close,” Harada wrote in an online post. “In recent years, I experienced the loss of several close friends in my personal life, and in my professional life I witnessed the retirement or passing of many senior colleagues whom I deeply respect. Those accumulated events made me reflect